We give a brief review of the holography inspired stringy hadron model, and its applications to QCD phenomenology. The core ingredient of the model is the rotating string with massive endpoints, obtained by mapping strings from holographic confining backgrounds to four dimensional flat spacetime. These strings can be used to describe the spectra and decays of hadrons. We address the problem of quantizing the string with massive endpoints, both for the critical and non-critical string.

The talk will be based on a series of papers written with J. Sonnenschein (TAU), most recently arXiv:1705.10329 [hep-th].